Bad Code (Customer) asked a question.

April 4, 2021 at 9:43 PM
Productivity migrate existing program (version 3.8) to version 3.9.

This program contains tags that end with ! or ** characters. As I opened it I did not receive any warnings about special characters.The V3.9 iteration seems to work fine in the office with the old tag names but I'm concerned about deploying the program. Am I missing something here?

P2-550-CPU with latest firmware. Tags ending with ! are declared in the hardware setup and allow hot swap. Tags ending with ** are in the ladder.

Thanks for taking a look.

  • 9 answers
  • 283 views

  • Todd Dice (Customer)

    Special characters no longer allowed. Release notes attached:

     

    PSuite V3.9 Release Notes

    • Bad Code (Customer)

      Thanks for the quick feedback, I agree with the points made. My concern though is that the scenario described in bullet 16 is not being played out. Specifically "When opening a project developed with an earlier version of the GUI that has tagnames containing disallowed characters, the user will be prompted to modify the offending tagnames" is not happening. The version 3.8 program (which contains so called offending tagnames) converts to a functional 3.9 version with no mention of tagnames at all.

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      • kewakl (Customer)

        I would make a guess that in item 16, AD is referring to ':' and '.' as the disallowed characters.

        : ---- Bit Of Word operator

        . ----Structure Member operator.

         

        Years ago, I had trouble with embedded commas in retentive string tags.

        I broke the tag into constituent parts (dropping any commas) and rebuilt the tag value on the fly.

        Any other disallowed characters will disable editing of any instruction containing tags with disallowed characters. - I may be rehashing something you already know.

         

        I hope that disallowing a whole set of characters because of import/export issues is a temporary workaround until we see a permanent fix. Many users in many locales use and depend on these currently disallowed characters in real life - as demonstrated in a recent post.

         

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  • kewakl (Customer)

    To easy your concerns, I would rename (if you can) the offending tags. Hopefully, the characters you choose to identify your contexts won't later be changed to be unsupported.

  • Bad Code (Customer)

    Excellent point. I'm just assuming the ! and * are special characters. This begs the open question "Does Automation Direct define Productivity's special character set anywhere?"

    • kewakl (Customer)

      The best that I can divine is any shifted numeric key and any extended (above 127) ascii/unicode.

      I am having difficulty deciding whether square brackets '[' and '] ' should be removed from some of my projects. From version to version, I have had a recurring issue with square brackets interfering with the search function.

    • PouchesInc (Customer)

      Someone from AD said that only normal ascii is supported, no longer "extended ascii". So ! and * should work just fine.

      https://techterms.com/definition/ascii

      https://theasciicode.com.ar/ascii-printable-characters/exclamation-mark-ascii-code-33.html

      So anything before number 128 in that list ^^^

       

       

       

      Honestly, I do not see why there was a regression of the software to only support basic ascii character set. If anything, work should be done to move forward and have Unicode UTF-8 as the supported character set. That is supported by everything in the world, supports far more languages across the world, and allows direct mapping of ascii characters to it so it has full compatibility with basic ascii for ease of transition.

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  • ADC_BusiDev_01 (AutomationDirect)

    I apologize for the confusion this has caused and we will update the release notes/help file to clarify.

     

    While ASCII characters are commonly used in software, they are not commonly used in PLC tagnames. Certain characters "in tagnames" can cause issues within the GUI as well as export/import compatibility with other devices.

     

    Here is a list of the rules:

    • We still allow creating ASCII characters in documentation fields, tagname comments, rung comments, instruction comments etc.
    • We still allow projects containing disallowed characters to be opened in 3.9 and transferred to/from the PLC.
    • We don't allow creation of new tags or editing of existing tags containing these characters. When you try to edit an existing tag, the ASCII character will be removed.

     

    Allowed/disallowed characters:

    • ASCII characters between 0 and 31(d). Not allowed
    • ASCII characters between 32(d) and 127(d). Allowed with the following exceptions:
      • 040(d) - ( open parenthesis
      • 041(d) - ) close parenthesis
      • 044(d) - , comma
      • 046(d) - . period
      • 058(d) - : colon
      • 127(d) - DEL
    • ASCII 128(d) and above. Not allowed

     

    To the OP @Bad Code (Customer)​ :

    The characters you used are allowed so you will not get the message when you open the project in 3.9.

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  • Bad Code (Customer)

    I would like to thank everyone who took the time to contribute to this topic and help make this forum the powerful resource that it is.

 

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